Archives for April 2016

“The losing of identity is a golden gun. It was not easy to hold it against my head and fire, but necessary. I needed great faith in my masters to suffocate myself through their holy bag of full of truth. I needed great courage to go out into the dark, tracking God into the unknown and not panic or get lost in all the startling new scents and sounds and sights or lose my temper tripping over those scheming night and day around me. Losing identity is the emerald dagger you need to plunge deep into yourself upon this path of divine recovery, upon this path to God.” [Hafiz]

This faith, this trust is something that is learned. Everyone has had a relationship with trust in the world. You’ve trusted what you know. You’ve trusted the past. And you’ve been afraid of the future because of what you’ve trusted in the past. You probably don’t look at it as trusting the past because at the same time you trusted the past, you hated the past. And yet, that’s what you believed in and that’s where trust develops.

In the journey of love, you’re being called to trust in something that you forgot. You’re being called to trust and put faith in a journey that, most of the time, seems upside down, inside and out, and that your mind that made a false world can’t…can’t make sense of. It doesn’t make any sense to realize that losing identity is a golden gun. The ego mind says don’t be ridiculous. My purpose here is to win. My purpose is to protect and defend what I already know, and to find the secret ingredient of winning over others. But the journey of love has a different purpose. It’s your true journey. It’s the only reality of the purpose of incarnation to remember your brilliance, your innocence. And even the word “your” is used here…it’s not “yours” as an identity. It is yours as the one heart of God. And this is why it is so essential to learn to offer love because you are offering love to reflections of yourself. As you learn to love without conditions, you’re learning to love your Divine Self, to come home to that reality.

It isn’t easy to hold the golden gun against your own head, but when you come to this place of the realization that you want nothing else and you can’t even stand another day of not meeting the Beloved, you gladly put the golden gun to your head. You no longer want the mind of suspicions and lack and winning. You long for peace. You long for resting in that love because the truth of you is stirring from deep within.

I needed great faith in my master to suffocate myself with his holy bag of truth. And it is that. It is that that you don’t want to listen to any more of the self-proclaimed masters in the world that have nothing to do with anything spiritual but are the loud voices of the ego that say winning is the way. Success is the way. All of those voices need to be turned away from. But, not in condemnation, but in love. To turn away from the voice of the lies of knowing, of getting, of proving, of winning. And instead turning the heart towards all these Beloveds and offering love, offering without conditions, the purity and innocence of who they truly are. To suffocate yourself in truth is a delicious way to go. It’s the only way, actually, to go. To love truth so much that you become a glutton of all the divine teachings that fill your heart with light. When you accept divine teachings, light is pouring into you. Not that you aren’t already the light, but it meets the light that has been hidden within you. All of the mysteries of the universe begin to become revealed. You begin to see light everywhere. You begin to see with your heart all the purity and innocence of everything. How does this occur except through your willingness to suffocate yourself in truth. To drink in so much truth that you’re going to burst. To join with all the divine beings in the forgiveness of all beliefs of limitation and separation.

I needed great courage to go out into the dark, tracking God into the unknown and not to panic or get lost in all the startling new scents and sounds and sights. It does take this great courage to follow the way that the masters have laid. It does take great courage to recognize the scents and the sounds and the vibration of love that is everywhere and is just beyond the old identities that you made in belief of separation. All of those old identities were made with fear and contempt and bitterness. None of them were real. None of them were true. You don’t have to suffer along the way back to love. But, there seems to be an attachment to suffering that convinces everyone that they need to struggle to return home. But as one of my teachers said to me it isn’t your healing that is difficult, it’s your resistance against it. And that resistance was very dominant for what seemed to be a long time until finally the white flag gets raised. Deeper and deeper and deeper you raise the white flag and say “I haven’t got a clue-what I’m doing, how to look at anything or how to make my way back. You have to show me because I don’t have a clue.” And love gladly shows you. And there is a deep place of relaxing, resting in God, as you learn to love. As you learn to take in the divine teachings and want to see only with the heart of love, that you refuse to accept all of the opinions and assessments and judgments of the past that you believed were righteous, you believed that they were authentic and that they made sense. And you even felt a certain satisfaction in their justification. But all of that has to be not only surrendered, but forgiven. To forgive is to let it be washed away, no longer wanted in any way, to let love lead you home.

The loss of identity is the emerald dagger you need to plunge deep into yourself on this path of divine recovery. It is a divine recovery from a world that is insane. It’s important to recognize the insanity that is held in the mind that believes it knows and believes in its ways. Why is it held so tightly? Because everything in your whole system of separation said, if I know enough, I’ll win. I’ll win and I’ll find a way of being safe and getting my due. When you believe that you have been unfairly treated and that you have been denied your worth and you believe that it was done from the outside, everything in you wants a payback. You don’t want to learn to offer love because everything in the back of the unconscious mind says that you need to have a fair exchange. Everything that you offer you need to see a return, an acknowledgement…it doesn’t matter how it shows up. It doesn’t even matter what you give in the world. You can give something that looks like an offering through financial. It doesn’t mean you want the financial back, it means that you want to have it recognized, you want to somehow be acknowledged, you want it to somehow be a feeling within yourself that you are good. This happens very often with donations to churches where the temptation is “I want my name to be known of what I gave” instead of bringing it to the church in the darkness and leaving it anonymously because that is where your healing is: to learn that there is nothing to get, only offering of love.

If you see someone with something in the world that you believe is not evenly distributed, that you believe that that is out of balance or why do they deserve to have when somebody else doesn’t deserve to have. All of these thoughts are being called to be surrendered and let go because love makes no conditions. And the only way that the world will heal is in each Beloved opening their hearts and learning to love without expectations of any kind. To give deeply and fully not out of obligation, never out of obligation, and never out of pity, and never out of guilt. Those three elements cannot ever bring you to peace or teach you the truth of love. There are no obligations with love. There’s a natural state of love, but it has nothing to do with any obligation. You owe me? No. There’s nothing owed, there is no exchange, there is no evenness. It is all absolutely balanced and harmonious. Love is by its very nature all balance and all harmony. But once the mind enters into the game of conflict and the rules that have been made up in the name of separation, love is gone. There is no love offered. So, it can never be through obligation, it can never be through expectation, it can never be through reciprocity, of expectations of getting something in return. And those beliefs of reciprocity of getting are so deeply ingrained that most of them can’t be easily seen. Everybody has felt that place of giving something and wanting others to be aware of it. Or giving something and having a sensation that comes from within…that it’s not a place of peace or joy…it’s a high. It’s a high of pleasure of being recognized for your giving. But, there is absolutely no love in it.

When the ego is involved, it’s all to get. It’s all in a belief that there is only scarcity and not the abundance of love that is actually being called to be awakened from within. And in the world one of the funniest places is what’s known in the world as co-dependency where even in the belief that you want to rescue someone from the idea of being without but in actuality the reason that you want to rescue them is because you believe that they are without and that they need to be rescued, and you join them in the false identity instead of truly bringing to them the strength of love, of their innocence, of their intrinsic perfect Self, and bringing that strength to them through your willingness to love. It’s a deep deep learning.

The belief that to give to someone will change the relationship is another element that the ego loves to use. You see a relationship that disturbs you and instead of bringing love to it and peace and harmony and seeing the Beloved only as their true light…instead you want them to behave differently. You want them to change the way that they behave so that you will feel better. There’s no love there either. It isn’t so that they will be eased out of the pain that they are displaying, and that you bring love to them. It’s so that they will change their behavior so that you will feel better. But there’s no love there. Because love is the offering of the truth that they are the light of God and that their behavior, their call for love, their cry for love…is all that you’re answering. You’re not looking to get something from them or to feel better through them, you’re looking to offer love, and being called to see their divine Self, not so that they will act differently, or if the situation was changed that you will feel safer or better. There’s just no love there. And this is what humanity has used in the name of love.

The urgency and the feeling of wanting to change the circumstances of others so that you will feel better is a desperate place of fear. There’s no love there. It’s seeing the world as a dangerous place that needs repair rather than to see past the beliefs of the past and really see the innocence of each Beloved and offer them that truth, not necessarily in words, but just as the Beloved who came as Jesus showed in every moment…he showed how to love without conditions. He didn’t say to anyone “I want you to be different. I want you to straighten out and change your behaviors so that I can like you again.” He loved without conditions. He had no opinion about all the Beloveds who were so fearful that they condemned him and hated him in that moment. He didn’t join them. He completely saw through their pain to their call for love and gave without limitation. He didn’t have them sign a contract saying “I’ll give you this if you give me back respect”. He saw their pain of their own self-hatred and brought them the truth of their innocence. And this is where all the healing is. This is where the healing is for all humanity, is to love without conditions.

How easy is it to hold a grievance. Especially after you believe that you’ve offered love or you’ve offered something to someone and they don’t either acknowledge it or they don’t reciprocate to your mind. Then a grievance can be held very easily of being believed to be unfairly treated. Well, what happens is that the lessons of learning to love are completely misunderstood, and, all of a sudden you’re going on an off ramp that has no relationship to learning to love. You can use the name of love, but it isn’t really love that you’re offering, because you’re not offering it without conditions. So, it’s a very deep place, a very deep place.

To go out into the dark tracking God. To go out into the dark and track God is to track every Beloved and to see the truth of God in each divine being that’s walking around in a body. Most have no relationship to the journey of remembering. It hasn’t woken up in them yet. It doesn’t matter. You’re there to bring love to them, not with teachings that you’re going to memorize, but with your heart. That you have no expectations of them to acknowledge you in any way, but you are there just to bring peace and harmony and no judgment. Your heart will be expanded as you let go of the belief that judgment has any purpose, because it has absolutely none. The idea that you would be the one that you would bring you into someone’s life and that you would be their judge, that you would be the one who was sent to have an opinion about their being right or wrong or liking their behaviors. There’s a beautiful teaching that actually says it is none of your business how someone else walks their journey. The only call is the call to love. The ego would like it to be the ego’s business of the ones who are more advanced in the ego’s mind to be the ones that would set the world right and have everybody straightened out. But there’s nothing there except the ego wearing a costume.

Imagine that a beloved friend calls you and speaks to you for hours about their beliefs and their pains and the Holy Spirit is whispering in your ear the whole time just keep offering love. Just keep your heart open and make no opinions of anything until I give you the word that will help. And you’re just listening to the Holy Spirit and you’re letting your heart stay open for the hours that this Beloved is in their confusion, in their upsidedowness. And your learning is to have no opinion about what you think of it, but just holding the truth of love with them. And then the Holy Spirit starts speaking the words that the Holy Spirit wants you to speak. And the words are of comfort, and ease, and forgiveness because they’ve done nothing, and they’ve always been the light of God. And you offer those words. There would be nothing in you that would expect a payment back because the words weren’t yours to begin with. The offering wasn’t yours to begin with. You were in the channel of love, learning to offer the love of God. And you are blessed by those words that came from God and you pass them on. There’s nothing in you that gave anything that you manufactured or you made. It’s the love of God that you are offering. It has to be passed on. It has to be extended. It has to be expanded. It’s how we learn of the universe and its magnificence and its fullness by offering that love without conditions.

The spirit of transformation…if you accept and ask for the help, the spirit of transformation will take you into the careful searching of your own mind that made the distortions of trying to get. Let the spirit of transformation take you into an honesty within to illuminate all the beliefs of trying to get anything, and opening that doorway so that they can all be released. So you can be freed from the pain and the poison of the belief that there is something to get. But, in order to be willing to open those channels of healing and letting the spirit of transformation actually transform your own mind, you’re accepting that beneath those beliefs of trying to get is the wholeness of your heart, where you’re willing to recognize that you have everything, that you are everything, that nothing of love has been damaged. And the more that you offer that love, the more you recognize it. You’re blessed in the same moment, but not because you’re trying to get anything, just because blessings occur all the time.

How many times have you worried about somebody else’s journey? When you worry about somebody else’s journey and what it looks like, you’re saying I know something. I know how things should look. I know how things should go. But you’re not recognizing that you’re only calling is to put that Beloved into the hands of God and recognize that their journey is with God and you’re there just to offer love. You’re not there to criticize or have an opinion about what their journey should look like, but to keep offering love and strength to each Beloved that they are the light of God. That they don’t have to worry about their journey. It’s guaranteed. Every Beloved’s journey is guaranteed that they’re going to remember the truth of love. That’s the journey. To go honestly and to keep letting the illumination of God reveal the way to walk on this Earth.

Show me how to love. I’m willing. I’m willing to learn the way of love, pure, without any expectations of acknowledgement or return. Nothing to get. To have a clean and pure relationship with the truth that there is nothing to get is a calling to be willing to be in honesty within. To be honestly searching…am I trying to get something? Is there something that I want in return? Acknowledgement. What is it? Anything? I want to be open and clean and without reservation. Offer love without conditions.

I want to learn. I want to learn the way that the masters came to show me. I want to remember. To put my faith in the masters that were sent to me. And I want to suffocate myself in their bag of truth. I want to cleanse and I want the mind to be cleansed by the truth so that there is nothing left of all the rules I made up in the belief of separation. I want to be freed from the rules that I made about giving and taking and getting. I want it all cleansed.

Let that be your power prayer. I want to be cleansed and learn to love.

This path to God. Have your intention just cleanse everything that I made up and only the love will remain. Easily and effortlessly the spirit of love, the spirit of transformation will cleanse everything. And the only thing that is really necessary for cleansing is just what’s been made up. It’s not reality. It’s just the past identity saying…I am without. But we learn that we are never without by actually offering love because as we offer love without conditions, we expand into the universe. Truly. It isn’t a high. It’s a state of being. It isn’t a payoff, a sense of a job well done. It isn’t like getting an A on your report card. It’s that blissful, peaceful resting into the universe of love. And, what you recognize in that is “ahh…this is more like home. This is the garden of love.” It’s just a place of offering love. Every time you experience an irritation, and everyone in the belief of separation recognizes that place…that is the opportunity of refusing that irritation and recognizing if there is an irritation it’s because there was an expectation of getting something that you believe you didn’t get, and it’s the opportunity of healing in that moment. That there is no battle. There’s nothing to fight with and there’s nothing to get from anyone.

YOU ARE the complete light of God and the journey is at the same time directed inward to find your innocent heart with God and at the same time offering love to the expansion of the universe, to everyone that is your reflection. And everything is your reflection. Offer that love. Just the willingness to have your heart open without any reserve. If you have someone that seems to be in conflict with you…more love. More love, more love, more love. More innocence, more blessings and no opinions. And, that becomes your place of peace. That becomes your restful sleep. Your restful lack of guilt, because guilt is waiting constantly to be stirred up. And it always comes from personal opinions and ideas of the past. There’s nothing to get. You have everything. Love is always all that there is.

I needed great courage to go out into the dark tracking God into the unknown and not panic or get lost in all of the startling new scents, sounds and sights or lose my temper tripping on those scheming night and day around me. No one to lose your temper with. Not having any more temper at all, because the temper you thought was natural disappeared in offering love having no expectations, only love. Every teaching is the same…only love, only blessings, only comfort. Only love.

Join us this weekend in the Awakening Together Sanctuary for these exciting programs.

Saturday Evening at 8:00 PM ET – The Weekend of Freedom Retreat coming up in June of 2016 showcases many of our regular teachers in the Awakening Together Sanctuary. Join David Fishman, Shiryl Kaplan, Barret Hedeen, Lorri Coburn and other guests in a discussion about the retreat and the use of Spiritual Round Tables.

Our Sunday Gathering with Reverend Gloria Wells starts at 10:15 AM ET. Reverend Gloria’s topic for Sunday is Sufficiency: now is enough because you are.

Kathy Smith is the reader and she will read a chapter from Eckhart Tolle A New Earth: Wanting, the need for more.

Michael Langford Interviews

On April 6, Rev. Regina Dawn Akers interviewed Michael Langford in person near his home in Nevada. Michael is the author of The Most Direct Means to Eternal Bliss, The Seven Steps to Awakening, Manonasa: A Spiritual Autobiography and many other useful spiritual books.

The result of Regina’s April 6 visit with Michael Langford is two one-hour audios. We will play these audios in the Sanctuary on two upcoming Sundays so we can all listen to them together. The first one-hour audio will be played on Sunday, May 1 at 8pm ET.

Bruce Rawles Special Mini-Series – Discernment: GIST and the Double Shield of Oblivion

In the last of this three part series, Bruce will discuss the process of discernment and they ways in which we fool ourselves. Join us at 9 PM ET Sunday evening for this humorous and intelligent discussion.

“Mercy is not a virtue that you choose to put on one day. Mercy has to be your deepest way of seeing, a generosity of spirit that draws from your identity, your deepest dignity, which is love.” Fr. Richard Rohr

This class is 3 weeks long.

The Bhagavad Gita is an eternal message of spiritual wisdom from ancient India. The word Gita means song and Bhagavad means God, so the Bhagavad Gita is literally the Song of God. Most experts feel the Bhagavad Gita was written 2200 – 2500 years ago, although some experts say that it was written as much as 5000 years ago. The Bhagavad Gita is a conversation, set on a battlefield, between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna. It is comprised of 700 sanskrit verses contained within 18 chapters. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna discusses topics such as ultimate truth, reincarnation, states of mind and liberation (awakening).

In this class you will:

1. The participant will become familiar with the classic Hindu work, The Bhagavad Gita.

2. The participant will contemplate verses from the Bhagavad Gita and realize his/her own guidance.

Specific Information:
Cost is $60.
Textbook needed is Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran.
Class is offered in PalTalk. Familiarity with PalTalk is helpful.
Registration closes on May 10.For more information on this class, click here.